they make their way to the car.
She lies down in the back of the police car, a grille separating her, like a criminal, from the back of the head and shoulders of the young policeman who is driving. The streets are unplowed and covered in several inches of new snow and she is aware of the eerie reflection of the car’s blue light, illuminating her in surreal-like flashes. The policeman speaks to someone on his radio; ten-four, he repeats, as he drives; when he has to use the brake, the car skids sideways. A truck with chains rumbles noisily past them in the opposite direction and Nina, momentarily caught in the truck’s headlights, has a glimpse of the driver’s surprised stare. Louise is almost there.
What, she wonders, does the young man in the restaurant with Louise look like?
Does he look like Philip?
Philip has an eidetic memory. He has total recall of names, places, and nearly every meal he has eaten—the good ones, in particular. He can quote entire passages from books and recite poems by heart: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Paradise Lost; Shakespeare’s speeches: Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York—she hears his voice taking on a sonorous tone along with a British accent. He can recite lengthy bits in Latin that he learned as a young boy.
A trick, he claims. One has to make an association between the words and a visual image that one positions in space. The Greeks knew how to do this. The story of Simonides is the classic example.
You told me once but I’ve forgotten it, Nina says.
Simonides was hired to recite a poem at a banquet but when he finished, his host, a nobleman, refused to pay him as he had promised, complaining that instead of praising him in the poem, Simonides praised Castor and Pollux and he should ask the two gods to pay him. Simonides was then told that two men were waiting for him outside and he left the banquet hall but when he got outside—
I remember now, Nina says. No one was there but the roof of the banquet hall collapsed, killing everyone. The corpses of the guests were so mangled that they were unrecognizable but since Simonides had a visual memory of where each had been sitting, he could identify them. I remember you told me that story on Belle-Île, one summer. We were in a café next to the harbor. I think we were waiting for the ferry and for Louise.
That’s my point exactly, Philip says, smiling.
Closing her eyes, she can see the house on Belle-Île. A colorful, old house, one side is painted red; the shutters, too, are red, a deeper, darker red. The plaster walls are a foot thick and the ceilings are low. Blue hydrangeas grow in dense hedges all around the house.
The house looks like the French flag, Philip says.
From Quiberon, they take the ferry. Often the sea is rough and the boat pitches and rolls, sending spray high up to splash the cabin windows where the passengers sit, blotting out the island as it grows closer. One time, Nina watches a farmer try to drive his horse and wagon on the boat and the horse, his hooves clattering noisily and drawing sparks, refuses at first to step onto the metal ramp. It is low tide and the grade is steep and the horse rears and nearly breaks his harness. He is a big white farm horse and during the entire voyage to Belle-Île, Nina hears him whinnying from below deck.
For close to twenty years, they rent the same house. The house belongs to a local couple, who slowly, slowly, over the years, renovate and modernize it, so that each summer there is something new—a stove, a fridge, an indoor toilet, curtains. Even in bad weather when they are forced to stay indoors, it makes little difference to Philip and Nina. Life on the island is simple, food is plentiful: oysters, langouste, all kinds of fish; every morning, in town, there is a market. Nina buys vegetables, bread, the local cheese—a goat cheese, with an acrid gamy taste. She and Philip swim, sit in the sun, read; one summer they read all of Proust in French: Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire “Je m’endors.”—Philip can recite several more pages by heart. In the afternoon when the wind picks up, he goes sailing and she paints—or tries to.
Claude Monet, famously, spent a summer on Belle-Île. A framed poster of his painting of rocks off the Atlantic coast—rocks that look like prehistoric beasts sticking their pointed, dangerous heads out of the water—hangs in her studio. She has stared long and hard at both the painting and the rocks, which she, too, wants to paint. The sea, in particular. How menacing it looks in Monet’s painting and how tame and lifeless in her own. Her sea looks like soup. Eventually, she gives up and destroys it. Later, back home, she paints the same scene abstractedly. The rocks are vertical brown lines, the sea blue, green, and red horizontal stripes. The painting is almost successful.
Louise learns how to swim and ride a two-wheel bicycle on Belle-Île. A few years later, Philip teaches her how to sail.
You should see how Lulu sets the spinnaker, Philip boasts. It takes her twenty seconds. He is proud of her.
Nina has an affair on Belle-Île but she does not want to think of that.
No, not now.
The house is only a short walk from the sea. The first thing she does when she arrives each summer is to go down to the beach and swim. The cold water is a shock, but bracing, and, after the long trip, it makes Nina feel clean.
Jean-Marc.
Is this the first time you’ve crossed the Atlantic? Nina asks, when she meets him.
Solo, he has sailed in a race from Belle-Île to an island in the Caribbean, and he has won. A celebration of his victory is being held at a local restaurant.
Fair-haired, solidly built, and not tall—no taller than Nina—his eyes are a light blue, like a dog’s. A husky. Or the blue of the Caribbean. He is a bit younger than Nina.
No, no, he laughs at her. This is my ninth trip across the Atlantic.
Oh. Embarrassed, she turns away.
Standing beside him, his pretty wife, Martine, smiles up at him.
Next, Philip is asking Jean-Marc a lot of questions: What type of sails? Does he have radar? Loran? How accurate is it? Loran, she hears Philip say, suffers from the ionospheric effects of sunrise and sunset and is unreliable at night.
Navigation systems never posed a problem for me. But nature, yes, Jean-Marc answers. Nature can pose big problems. Two years ago, when I was halfway across the Atlantic, a whale attached herself to my boat. First she swam on one side of my boat, then she dove under and disappeared for a few minutes—Jean-Marc makes the motion of a whale diving with his hands—before she reappears again on the other side of my boat. She was playing with me. She continues like this for two days and two nights—I can still see the whale’s little eyes shining up at me in the dark, Jean-Marc says, shaking his head. It makes me—how you say?—complètement fou.
In French, whale is feminine, la baleine, Philip explains to Nina, imitating Jean-Marc’s accent and gestures, as he retells the story.
I know, she says.
Je sais.
Philip’s assurance always astonishes her. It is not arrogance but a confidence, based in part on old-fashioned principles and in part on intelligence, that he is right and, usually, he is. For Nina, this is both a comfort and an irritant.
Strange, too, Nina reflects for perhaps the hundredth time, how Philip, who was born and raised hundreds of miles from
